In the booklet accompanying the Luyas third LP, Animator, the chilling instrumental "Crimes Machine" bears an unusual songwriting credit: "The ghost wrote this one." That description could just as well extend to the whole album. In the earliest stages of writing Animator, the Montreal four-piece received news of a close friend's unexpected death, and the album that they put together in the months after this shock is suffused with grief, spiritual questioning, and the occasional haunting. In this context, a tension that's always been at the heart of the Luyas music-- a tug-of-war between chirpy, playful sounds and dark, brooding feelings-- becomes more pronounced than ever. The near-nine-minute opener "Montuno" begins in elegantly buoyant tempo, like a prizewinner's trot. "I was gonna die," Jessie Stein sings, her coy peep of a voice making the bleak line that much more jarring. "Be fed to the horses."
"Montuno" is an elegiac, ambitious, and affecting orchestral pop arrangement divided into three movements, a fact that should place the Luyas in context a little better than their geographical coordinates do. Though they hail from Montreal, the Luyas' brand of art-pop has little in common with the DIY electro-- think Grimes and Majical Cloudz-- that's currently serving as shorthand for their hometown's signature sound. The band instead recalls a time when "Montreal" was still synonymous with the stately, string-lined macabre of early Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre, and the similarities aren't coincidental-- the arrangements were composed and performed by members of those bands. Sparse, understated strings courtesy of Arcade Fire violinist Sara Neufeld give Animator a subtly evocative atmosphere, while horns by Bell Orchestre's Pietro Amato infuse Stein's lyricism ("Sometimes I feel like a deaf woman dancing," she sings on "Earth Turner") with a sense of muted majesty.
Though Stein's voice can be one-note and sometimes lacks the necessary dynamism or range to keep these songs moving to new places, her lyrics are often striking. "Channeling" is a moving account of the inspiration she draws from her friend's memory ("I am listening to your voice/ I am trying to hear its key," she sings, "Put your song in me"), while the album's most entrancing melody, "Fifty Fifty", gets its name from a bit of poetic nihilism, "Asked my friend what he believes/ He said, 'Fifty fifty.'" Some of the album's most evocative imagery, though, comes from "Face", a song in which the contrast of Animator's ever-present ghost makes her feel trapped in her own corporeality. "I thought of you/ 'Everything,' I said, 'Is some kind of tether,'" she sings over the uneasy moan of Neufeld's strings. "I try to lose my face."
Still, as evocative as they are on the page, many of these lyrics fail to come to life over the course of a record that often feels diffuse, meandering, and cold. All of the elements that make up Animator's sound-- the distended creak of guitars, hallowed beds of analog synth, and Stein's sing-song melodies-- float through its zero-gravity atmosphere like lonely meteors, never providing the drama or satisfaction of crescendo.
This isn't always the case with the Luyas. Their solid 2011 album, Too Beautiful to Work, found a balance between deep space firmaments and the blunt impact of vivid, stirring hooks; the atmosphere drew you in but off-kilter melodies of songs like "Cold Canada", "What Mercy Is", and the title track lingered long after the record was over. Though inspired by weightier and more evocative themes, Animator already feels less memorable-- it seems to constantly evade the listener's grasp. The skittish "Your Name's Mostly Water" lifts the famous epitaph from John Keats' grave-- "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water," chiseled, ironically, into the chilly permanence of stone. It's a fitting invocation for a record preoccupied with the ephemeral nature of life and the cold cruelty of death, but it's unfortunate that this epitaph also describes immateriality of its melodies and the transience of its pleasures.
